My daughter is still a bit young for most stuff - we usually rely on baby sensory moving shapes for ten minutes of quiet every now and then - but we’ve just started watching Milkshake on Channel 5 in a morning too.
Peppa Pig is actually brilliant. Lovely, gentle, nothing ever blows up, no one turns into a superhero. It feels more like 80s kids TV than something still being made.
Anyone else got a favourite? Or do they all just become hateful piles of tosh after years of being forced to watch them?
We won't have Peppa Pig on; Sarah feels she gets away too much with misbehaving.
Ours are a little older (4 & 2), but have been big fans of Hey Duggee. Lately, E has been obsessed with Peter Rabbit (which might even skew a little old for her, tbh) and classic Fireman Sam.
Hey Duggee is good but annoyingly the iPlayer won't auto-play episodes so we have to fish the phone back out every four minutes to play the next one.
Ours is pretty big into Paw Patrol (which is fine as far as pro-capitalist libertarian agitprop goes) and a couple of newer Transformers shows, Rescue Bots and its Academy spin-off. At least they all show the importance of cooperation and teamwork, and that different people are good at different things but they can all contribute.
Lately he's been on a classic Scooby-Doo kick, thanks to a couple of compilations on the official Hanna-Barbera YouTube channel which he found hilarious.
Somehow he got the live action Super Mario Super Show on his Kindle Fire, and that's been a big hit.
Peppa Pig is decent, but Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom is amazing. Same team, most of the same voices but it's aimed at a slightly older audience and it's genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Easily my favourite of the programmes my boy used to watch as a littl'un.
For older kids (5+ maybe), Octonauts is great, and surprisingly educational.
My daughter is 3 years old next week, and she seems to rotate her favourites. 'In The Night Garden' is still a bedtime fixture, and her current favourites are 'Peter Rabbit' and, God help me, those Americanised nursery rhyme / sing-song things on iPlayer and that. (Cocomelon et al.)
She also will add 'Peppa Pig' and 'Hey Duggee' into the mix (and news of new Duggee was genuinely the most excited I've been about TV this year). There's also the occasional blast of Pingu, Topsy & Tim and Charlie & Lola.
She doesn't respond well to Disney stuff right now, though. She's not a fan of any sort of peril, no matter how mild.
Pingu is great. Topsy & Tim is horrendous, it was one of Little Miss Bloodaxe's favourites. There was a Cbeebies reality show about kids in primary school, some of them on an island with about seven kids in the whole school - that was her absolute favourite.
My boy was obsessed with an absolutely terrible show called Numberjacks, anthropomorphic CGI numbers having incredibly tedious adventures in the real world. I think they lived in a sofa or something. Hateful programme.
It was one of a range of supposedly "educational" shows - but Alphablocks was always much better.
Miles has mentioned Alphablocks a few times, but I'm not sure where he's seen it because I never have. He's quite into Numberblocks as well, which seems to have helped with his numeracy quite a bit.
We won't have Peppa Pig on; Sarah feels she gets away too much with misbehaving.
The only issue we ever had with a TV show was the Horrid Henry series, which sparked a bout of bad behaviour and answering back worse than anything we'd ever seen. That got banned in our household immediately.
It's a shame because the books aren't actually too bad - book Henry is a misunderstood anti-hero in the same sort of mould as Just William, a kid who tries to do the right thing but somehow it never works out for him. TV Henry is a horrid, rude little shit with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
I’m not sure a 9-month old gets much out of it, but I’m loving it.
It’s on CBeebies at about 7.30, or the whole thing is on Disney Plus. I googled it after catching a few episodes and thinking it was unusually good; apparently it made a lot of ‘best TV of the year’ lists last year.
Our twins (who will be 2 in Feb) and have just discovered Wallace and Gromit. They love it, which I'm very pleased about. The Wrong Trousers is particularly popular, mainly because Gromit gets a face full of jam. And there's a bad penguin.
Also, they are increasingly obsessed by the BBC Julia Donaldson adaptations, some of which are great (Room on the Broom, Snail and the Whale), some of which are less good (Gruffalo, Stick Man).
Our six-year-old has only just discovered Wallace and Gromit, but he's also a big fan of Gromit's faceful of jam. (He's also very keen on the skiing washing machine from Grand Day Out.)
I think Brian is also a fan but Hilda on Netflix is an absolutely lovely little cartoon series with a slightly surreal Scandinavian kind of vibe to it. Probably best for slightly older kids (6-11 maybe) and of course discerning adults too.
I noticed this weekend there's now a full-length movie up as well as the two series so we'll be watching that soon.
